by Colum McCann
Rudi, directly facing her, had his head thrown back in laughter, creased lines on his face, wrinkles around his eyes. Beside him was his friend, Victor, with his dumb mustache and a multicolored cummerbund. Margot wished she could seize Rudi’s arm and shake him, say something to him, but what would she say? There was a thought at the back of her mind that she desperately wanted to communicate, yet she was only aware of its existence, not its content. So many days felt like this now. She had retired. Tito had passed on. She brought flowers to his gravestone in Panama City like a character from some nineteenth-century novel. She often stood at the edge of the field near the graveyard and found herself watching the wind move the grass. Or she found herself caught at a traffic light in London wondering just what sorts of lives were being carried in the cars that passed her. Or she would read a book and suddenly forget what it was all about. As a child, nobody had told her how the life of a dancer would be, and even had she known she never would have understood, how it could be so full and empty at the same time, seen in one manner from the outside but experienced differently on the inside, so that two completely dissimilar ways of living had to be held in unison, juggled, acknowledged.
Rudi had once told her they were hand in glove. She had wondered who was what, was she hand or glove, and now was she neither? Rudi was forty-three, maybe forty-four now, she couldn’t remember. Yet he was still performing. And why not? She had gone on until she was sixty.
She watched the bride and groom begin their first dance. Tom with his old stiff body. Odile in her white shoes made especially for the occasion by her new husband. White satin rimmed with lace, no heels. Her thin legs. Her small hands. Tom lifted the train of Odile’s veil and draped it over his forearm. Surely that must be the key, Margot thought, to live your life freely and honestly and with love. Her love had been dance. Rudi’s also. It wasn’t that they had been denied access to the other kind of love, no, that wasn’t it at all, not at all—but theirs was a love of a different thing, bruising and public. Love had never quite happened to her in the way it happened to others. Tito, yes. But Tito was an impossible person until he became an impossible body. Tito saw her as an elegant armpiece. Tito had warmed other beds. And then Tito had been shot and became everything he had never been before, useless and good-hearted. Oh, she had loved him, yes, but not love in the sense that it hollowed her out whenever she saw him. Margot often wondered if she were naïve, but she had caught glimpses of real love and was catching one now, she was sure of it, Tom and Odile, the awkward way they handled each other’s bodies, their shy courtesy, the sheer beauty of their homeliness.
Rudi had a champagne glass at his mouth. She had heard that he’d paid for the wedding ceremony, yet had not told anyone. His hidden generosity. Still, he seemed distant as the couple dragged themselves across the floor. People spoke of it as loneliness but Margot knew it was not loneliness. Loneliness, she thought, caused a certain madness. It was more a search for that thing beyond dance, a desire for the human. But what could be better, what could top the never-ending ovations, was there anything in life that had ever crested them? And then she knew. The thought had never struck her quite so clearly. She had danced until her body gave out and now she was loveless. The doctor had told her she had cancer. She would probably last quite a few years but it was cancer, yes, cancer, that was the full stop toward which her life was heading. She had not told anyone. She would not even tell Rudi for a while. But, still, there was something else she had to tell him, and she was searching her mind for the words. Dance. Cures. Pills. Sleeping pills and diet pills and pain pills and pills for life itself, pills for every illness, jealousy to bronchitis, pills in the drafty hallways where young girls sweated and wept for the roles they never got, pills for ruptured bank accounts, pills for backstabbings, pills for betrayals, pills for the broken way in which you walked, pills for the pills themselves. Margot herself had never taken the pills, but she often swept little white imaginary tablets through her mind to cure the pain. And now ovarian cancer. No pills to cure that. She felt the room closing in. She watched dancers on either side of her, tucking into their food, as they always did. Later the girls would throw up in the bathrooms. And the shoemakers were raucous at the other end of the room. Beer glasses swaying in the air. Toasts. Later Rudi would sing his Vladivostok love song, his party piece. She could feel the evening creeping to its end, the inevitable farewell to the newly married couple, the envy she might feel. It was nothing she would ever make public. If anything, she was diplomacy itself. She had always been. And she was happy for Tom, happy he had found something beyond his craft. But what had she found, what had she discovered? A dark tumor in her body. She was not bitter, it wasn’t that, she was just shocked to have been dealt such a hand. Surely she deserved more. Or perhaps not. Her life had been fuller than any other she had known. Death would probably arrive in a yacht, or a drawing room, or on a sandy beach.
What was it that she needed to tell Rudi? What was it in his grin, in his laughter, in his leaning towards Victor, in his consumption of the world that she needed to arrest, if only for a moment? What an exquisite life. They had, she knew, enjoyed the greatest years dancers could have. People thought they had slept together but they had not. They were too close for that. Yet they had thought of it, contemplated an attachment beyond dance. To make love to him. It would have destroyed them. Dancing was more intimate, anyway. It was a mitosis, they became one. They had seldom argued. If anything she had been a mother to him, increasingly so over the years. But what Margot wanted to say had nothing to do with mothers or countries or other manifold myths. It had nothing to do with love or its attendant despairs. Nothing to do with dance. Or did it? Did it? She could feel her fingers trembling. Soon the bridal dance would be over and she would be forced to talk pleasantries, to bring out the Margot in her, to hold her chin high, to clap politely, perhaps even stand as if the married couple were to take an encore. She watched Victor whisper something in Rudi’s ear. And then, with a wave of relief, Margot knew what it was. She knew she had to interrupt, she had to say this before she let it go, that it was the most important thing she could tell Rudi, the greatest piece of advice he would receive. She hesitated, laid her fork politely at the side of her plate, and reached for a glass of water to quench her thirst. She tried to catch Rudi’s eye, but he was in another world. She would have to say this. She would have to tell him to give it up. It was that simple. He should pack it in and concentrate on his other gifts, choreography, teaching. Before he grew too old. She needed so desperately to say this to him. Retire. Retire. Retire. Before it’s too late. She picked up the fork again. How to get his attention? She reached across and gently touched his outstretched fingers with the silver prongs of the fork. He felt the tapping and looked at her and smiled. Victor also smiled, but then Victor again whispered something to Rudi, and Rudi held up his hand to Margot as if to say: Wait. She leaned back in her chair and waited and the song ended, and she rose from the table to share her applause for Tom and Odile, and in the middle of the clapping, Rudi reached across the table to take her hand and say: Yes? She hesitated and grinned and then said simply: Aren’t they beautiful, Tom and Odile? Aren’t they a wonderful couple?
* * *
Transcribed from interview with David Furlong on May 23rd, 1987, in Holborn, London. Interview by Shane F. Harrington, student of ethnography from Edinburgh University. Due to technical difficulties with recording device/microphone the interviewer’s questions were inaudible:
Well, yeah, he wasn’t a diamond cutter or nothing but he knew what he wanted and took all he could get. So he pretty much got his money’s worth, yeah. You charged him more because of who he was, seventy-five quid was a good kill in those days.
You’d have to keep your mouth shut, no Daily Mirror, Sun, no News of the fucking World.
He was always doing this exam, like, checking out your arms and taking a look at your fucking neck, even between your toes, he was scared of junkies I s’pose.
You had to be
fresh-faced, you know, with sleeveless shirts and tight trousers. But he didn’t mind the smell of cigarettes, some of the trade didn’t like cigarettes, but he wasn’t like that, at least you were allowed a smoke afterwards.
He’d pick you up on Kings Road or around Picadilly. Sometimes you’d go to the clubs with him if his mood was right.
Heaven over there in Charing Cross. Or the Colherne. But most of the time he’d go to the normal places, you know. The Roxy, the Perennial, Tramps, Annabel’s, the Palais.
Everybody was right fucked up on coke and booze. People were shagging in the leather booths.
He was fucking weird, he’d take you to his table and he’d sit you down with his mates, all fancy pants and groupies. But then he wouldn’t take you home, didn’t want to be seen walking with you out the club.
Couldn’t fucking figure him out. But he was Russian and I s’pose if you shag your cousins for a hundred thousand years that’s what happens, ain’t it?
Sometimes he got his manager to drive you back, or a friend of his, or he’d get you a taxi through the club owner, they’d do anything for him they would. So you’d be waiting outside his place, right? By the gate, just waiting. And all the neighbors could see if they wanted. But he didn’t care about that. Figure that one out, then.
I was only there four times, he never remembered me or even asked my name.
I think I told him Damian or something. You never give your real name. Besides, I had a girlfriend and she had no fucking idea. She liked the money but.
I heard him on the telly one night. He was tossing on about dancing, some shit like, I don’t know, like ruining your body for the pleasure of strangers, some shit like that. And what the fuck did he think I was up to? Christ. For the pleasure of strangers.
He had his pleasure yeah, and then he had it again, and then he just rolled over and went to sleep and you’d think, fuck me, I should case this fucking place, I should nick all his weird fucking paintings, with lords and hounds and bugles and shit, just fucking skive out of there.
But five minutes down the road you’d be nicked.
One time I crawled out of bed and the housekeeper was awake, she made breakfast, scones and fruit, she kept looking over her shoulder at me.
Eerie little froggie chick, checking me out, making sure I wasn’t running off with the silver. She’d rather put her head in the oven than talk to me.
I sat there quiet as could be and then she called a taxi.
The next night I was out in the Roxy again and he passed me in the club without a glance. I’d already spent fifty of the seventy-five quid on a new shirt. It turned everyone else’s head, but not his. He had someone else in his booth all serious and close. And then he got up and walked past me. He didn’t even say a word. Cocksucker.
* * *
He’s still performing with all his power. His genius is that he can bring out the child in all of us, just by watching him. He’s heroic, he’s dancing against the clock. Here is a man who will dance as long as he can, to the end, to the last drop of blood.
—JACQUELINE KENNEDY ONASSIS, 1980
What? Is that boy still dragging his bone all over town?
—TRUMAN CAPOTE, 1982
More than anything else he’s a homebody. People don’t realize that about him, but he is. When he comes to our French château the first thing he always asks for is a glass of wine and a little silence so he can sit by the fire and contemplate. And at our brownstone on Sixty-third and Madison he sits and looks at the art for hours on end, literally hours! His real passion is the Medievals. Not a lot of people are aware of that.
—RENÉE GODSTALK, 1983
* * *
Las Mercedes, Caracas
May 1984
Rudi!—
It is the beginning of the rainy season and I am stuck indoors having ingested some wonderful painkillers and I am sending this letter to my five thousand most intimate friends, ha ha, so please forgive the handwriting. I am practicing yoga, sitting on the floor in lotus position, my ass has never known such discomfort. Imagine what it must be like to be from New Delhi! I have changed humble abodes as you can see and now have a house here in the center of Caracas with flowers and vines and red tiles, which is slightly better than the Lower West Side, especially on Sundays after brunch when all the amateurs were lining Ninth Avenue, throwing up in the gutters. The jazz is worse, however. I used to think I missed Venezuelan music but there’s a band that plays on the paseo every night, they sound like eight drowning rats, and the fact is there are only three of them. I came here with a friend who was in the buddy program, he took sympathy on me for a few months, he also happened to have a degree in Oriental medicine, but I brought a secret stash with me just in case, used up all my blank prescriptions, also sold my Warhol cock paintings, et voilà! here I am to spend all my money and die. Maybe they’ll carry me up to the hills and cover me in cardboard. I am now alone since Aaron, my paramour, left with his Oriental medicines in tow, that’s life I suppose, easy come easy go.
The city is not the place I knew, but who cares you won’t exactly hear my heart breaking under the noise of the traffic. There’s at least twelve hundred billion people in Caracas and highways and ramps and skyscrapers. They wear flared jeans and thigh-length boots (some of them I think must have raided your old closets!) and there’s a boatload of rich gringos flushing out our oil. So, yes, the place has changed. I could not even find the hill where I grew up, if that’s the word.
In the taxi from Simon Bolivar the driver made a detour to the Catia barrio to relieve us of the burden of our luggage. I somehow remembered the local slang for: If you don’t turn this taxi around I’ll eat your dick for breakfast, you ugly cocksucker. Such eloquence. He almost crashed into a light pole. He gave us the ride for free and then I tipped him outrageously so I now have a reputation, if my youth was not enough. Don’t fuck with Victor he’d much prefer to fuck (with) you! Aaron did something terrible the first night. He threw all my Lucky Strikes out the balcony window and the young boys down on the paseo (all from the tin sheds in the ranchos) went wild. They tucked them under the sleeves of their T-shirts, a la Brando. Oh their brown arms, how it took me back. Be happy, go Lucky. One of the pretty little things (how pretty I used to be!) is an expert pickpocket, I got to know him the next day when he came around for the cigarette ends. We struck a deal. He goes to the Hilton Caracas on Avenida Libertador, where all the businessmen stay, or the new art museum, where the tourists hang out, and he steals cigarettes for me. He gets an extra dollar if they’re the right brand. He doesn’t even need a knife to slice open pockets, his fingernails are so long and sharp that they cut any cloth, clever little thing. Sometimes I wonder what would I have been, apart from dead, if I had stayed here. Excuse me while I drag my carcass over to the table and ingest yet another tablet. We only live once.
I am doing yoga. I am doing yoga, Rudi. I hear you laughing.
Before he left Aaron taught me to meditate so perhaps this is the first time in my life that I’ve learned to cross my legs. The first time I tried it I swore I’d break apart, a bad Venezuelan pretzel. I always thought that if God (what a bore) wanted me to touch my toes he would have put them in my crotch, but He’s not so benevolent, it seems. But the yoga’s good for me. I tell myself over and over, This is good, this is good, Victor, you are not a complete asshole, do your yoga, do your yoga, you are not a complete asshole, well perhaps just a tiny bit. Before Aaron left (well, before I kicked him out) we used to wake early and go out onto the balcony, where we set up. Aaron was sad that it wasn’t an east-facing balcony. We’d meditate for perhaps an hour and then we’d have breakfast. Orange juice, croissants and grapefruit, no vodka allowed! Aaron was a health food nut. He kept trying to get me to put on weight. The fridge was stocked with polyunsaturated margarine, pickles, yogurt, chutney, gherkins, peanut butter, coconuts, high-calorie chocolate milk shakes, everything. He was tall and sandy-haired and magnificent beyond compare. Rudi, my friend, his cock
may not have been a poem but the cheeks of his ass certainly did rhyme. He saw you dance once in Connecticut, and said, I quote, that you were graceful, provocative and sublime—why do all the Anglo boys like their ridiculous words?
My doctor on Park Avenue told me that Caracas would be my death warrant, what with intestinal disorders, cheap medicine, bad hospitals, dirty air et cetera et cetera. But I have been here five months now and have steadily improved. What I do is I take a half-hour taxi ride to the coast. I sit on a deck chair on the beach and meditate and in my head I envision the cells and then I go blam blam you little fuckers blam blam, trying to pretend they’re the uptight bouncers who didn’t let me in free to the Paradise Garage at the end, blam blam, you’re gone, blam blam, you should work at Saints for godsake, blam blam, look what ugly shoes you’re wearing, blam blam, there’s shit on your lip. And then I open my eyes and there’s blue water (bluish) lapping up on the golden (yellowish) sand. What fun. Then I verbally abuse my lesions and tell them to rot in hell. I am a forty-two-year-old man playing games in his head. Why not, life has played games with me. This morning, before the rains, I went to buy myself a blanket and met a mestizo woman who looked more like Mother than any other woman on earth. Maybe, as you say, there’s a double for us all somewhere. I went home, curled up on the chair and fell asleep dreaming.
I miss New York and all the places and everyone and everything and especially the Lower East Side, it was so disgusting, so wonderful. The only thing I regret is not having enough regrets. For instance, not saying good-bye to the garbagemen. I’d have loved to have seen their faces when they saw my furniture out on the street. They must have sung an aria. Oh this fabulous yellow divan! Goodness me, what a pretty cock ring! Oh my, what a delicious-looking dildo, I do declare!
My life has been one room after another (cubicles mostly) and now I am more or less stuck in this one since if I go out on the streets of Caracas it is quite likely I’ll get rolled and not in the desired way.
