“I came because of the news,” she said. “I felt frantic and helpless. How did your people fare, Serge Pavlovitch?”
“Well enough,” he replied. “And yours? The Princess Stassova?”
“I am most worried about her. She was truly my sister. Is truly. What am I saying? I’m so tired, Serge Pavlovitch. Could we speak in the morning, after I have rested?”
Diaghilev smiled and inclined his head, that large oval with the streak of white in the dyed black of his hair. “Natalia, Natalia,” he intoned. Then, suddenly sharp, he asked: “This baby—it’s due soon?”
She colored, feeling undressed and exposed in her whalelike proportions. No wonder this man preferred other men: They did not bulge out, become obscene fertility goddesses. She had become a veritable horror, a freak. ‘‘It’s due any time,” she stammered miserably, looking at Leonid Massine with mute appeal: Make him go away, she thought. Don’t let him take such pleasure in my grossness. “I shouldn’t have traveled,” she added to fill the silence. “My physician was furious.”
“Hotel lobbies are quite unsuitable for this sort of thing, I quite agree,” Diaghilev remarked with amusement. “But I’m asking for a reason. Picasso and Pierre are working with Leonid on some marvelous new ballets. It would be wonderful to have you with us again, my dear.”
Natalia’s hands began to tremble. To steady them, she clasped them together over the mound of her stomach, covered with the fur of her coat. She lifted her chin resolutely to regard her old employer. She smiled. “You flatter me, Serge Pavlovitch. But not enough. Not quite enough. If Boris were alive, I would have outmaneuvered you somehow—but alone, you know, I can’t. You two were a perfect match for each other. I can’t compete.”
Diaghilev licked his fleshy lips. “And your new husband, Pierre? You don’t trust him to bargain for you?”
“It is not his business to do so,” she replied calmly. “Good night, gentlemen.”
In the scented night air, waiting for their car, Diaghilev said to his protégé: “There goes a great lady, a brilliant dancer. With her in a company of his own, and with Vaslav, Kussov would have dominated the entire world of ballet. As it is, I feel immensely sorry for her.”
“Why is that?” Massine asked.
Diaghilev merely shrugged and lifted his hands palms up in the air.
Natalia said to the desk clerk: “You can bring the bags up. Right now I simply need to be directed to my husband’s room.”
Still small, her face ringed by curls under a high-crowned velvet hat, Natalia seemed oddly proportioned. The rest of her was trim, petite, and elegant. Her skirt peeked from beneath her fur coat, eight inches from the ground, and her small buttoned boots of ivory patent leather gleamed attractively below it. The clerk looked at her with appreciation, but when his glance wandered to her midpoint, his eyes became worried. Not here, he silently begged.
The bellhop escorted Natalia to a baroque elevator, behind grilled doors. Halfway down the final hallway, a feeling of suffocation grasped Natalia’s throat, and she laid a nervous hand over the young man’s uniformed arm. “Wait,” she breathed. She fumbled in her purse and withdrew some lire, which she pressed into his hand. “Just give me the key,” she told him. “I can proceed from here.”
He retreated at once down the dark corridor with its tapestried walls and deep crimson carpet. She remained hesitant, and felt light-headed. It was just a feeling, and she tried to shake it off reasonably. But in the recent past, logic seemed to have deserted her completely: The events in Russia, the confusion of her own sentiments, and the pregnancy appeared to have chased order away with a cudgel. She held the key tightly in her gloved hand and arrived at the door.
Should she knock or simply open it? She did not wish to intrude upon Pierre. She had come on impulse, without warning. She had always prized a separate niche for her professional life, a kind of neatness that did not brook intrusion. She was a private person. She knocked.
It was close to two in the morning. Diaghilev and Massine had undoubtedly been on their way home from one of their late suppers. Natalia was very tired now that she had reached her destination: She did not even want to have to explain to Pierre. Let him merely hold me, she thought, which was as close to a prayer as she could come. With a stab of pain, she thought: But what am I to him now? He can’t touch me the way I am. I’m simply a nuisance, in the way.
The door swung open on its well-oiled hinges and Pierre stood staring at her, squinting. He was wrapped in a large towel, from which his naked legs, powerfully muscled, emerged forlornly. The thick curls on his head fell over his eyes, and he reminded her of a young child awakening. All he needed was to rub sleep from his eyes with pudgy fists to complete the image. She touched his cheek and smiled at him, tenderness flowing into her heart. “It’s all right,” she reassured him with amusement. “I’m real. I had to come, Pierre. The loneliness was unbearable, since the news of the Revolution.”
He was not reacting. His eyes had enlarged, but he stood like a statue before her, disconcerting her. He was also blocking the doorway. Feeling ridiculous with her bulging stomach, Natalia uttered a short, embarrassed laugh and squeezed by him into the room. It was dimly lit by a single lamp, and she could see the patterned carpet, the elaborate, ornate furniture: a table, two chairs with elaborate scrollwork, a portmanteau. To the far right was a large, unmade bed. The bedspread lay entangled with cover and sheet, and the pillows were scattered about. Pierre had always been disorderly.
“Natalia,” Pierre said. She turned to him, totally exhausted, ready to collapse. The smile was slipping off her face from sheer lack of strength. He appeared fully awake now, and she could not understand the expression: concern, anger, bewilderment, resentment, embarrassment? Not now, she answered mutely. Not now.
He suddenly reached out and touched her arm, his grasp strong and imprisoning. “You’re hurting me,” she said with some exasperation. “The bags should be arriving at any minute now. Put something on—or go back to bed.”
Then, she followed his gaze to the bed itself, and her extremities, fingers and toes, began to tingle with numbness. Her lips fell open. An overwhelming lethargy robbed her of rational thought. She could make out the form of someone in the bed, moving on the pillows, a young woman, wearing a white nightshirt trimmed with lace. I have one almost exactly like it, Natalia thought stupidly. She watched the girl descend from the bed, her graceful feet touch the floor. She is a dancer, Natalia thought, like recognizing like. The girl’s hair was brown and shone from the soft yellow glow of the lamp. Her face was very pale and oval, a cameo.
Pierre did not move, and Natalia could not breathe. The girl stepped resolutely across the carpet toward them. She was young and pretty, though not beautiful. Neither am I, Natalia thought wryly. She had never seen the woman before and knew at once that she was not a Russian. “I don’t know you,” Natalia intoned, and there was an odd note of wonder in her voice.
The woman regarded her quietly. “I’m not important, Madame Riazhina,” she replied. “I am sorry.”
“I am sorry, too. But he is a most compelling man. I do understand.”
The girl blinked. Tears came to her eyes, and she looked away. But Natalia’s brown eyes pursued her relentlessly. Her gloved hand reached out to touch the other’s arm. “Please tell me who you are,” she asked.
“Diaghilev calls me Vendanova. My name is really Jacqueline, Jacqueline Vendane. If I had known you—”
“Yes, well. I don’t own my husband. We are all individuals, Miss Vendane. We are born alone and we die alone, a cliché but nevertheless a fact. Another is that we must live with what we do. You went into this with a clear conscience: Who could be hurt? Live with it, my dear. I don’t pretend not to be hurt, but it’s hardly the end of the world. Good night, then.”
Jacqueline Vendane burst into tears, her cool composure falling away like a molting skin, and she ran into the adjoining bathroom. Why is this happening to me? Natalia wondered dully. She w
ent to the nearest armchair and fell into it heavily. Pierre still stood mutely staring at his wife. She could not look at him.
The bathroom door opened, the young British dancer stepped out, dressed and coiffed. She passed in front of Natalia without meeting her eyes, but when she walked by Pierre, he seized her arm, and her face, frightened and wondering, turned fully toward him. Pierre’s dark eyes seemed to bore into her, devouring her. She shook herself loose, but he blocked her passage with his absurdly clad body. She waited for him to speak, as Natalia had waited before her. But he simply squeezed his hands into two fists and pounded them into one another in frustration. His eyes were bloodshot.
When the girl had left, Natalia sank her forehead into her right hand. The room was dancing around her in all its baroque bad taste. Finally she raised her head with extreme will power and looked at her husband. “This has been going on a long time?” she asked, in a calm but weak voice. Only her fingers continued to tremble.
He chewed on his lower lip. “Do you intend to keep seeing her?” she added. “Tell me, for God’s sake!”
Pierre shook his head. “Stop it. Don’t question me now. If you do, I’m going to leave, Natalia. I can’t stand this!”
“You can’t? It’s a pleasant diversion for me, then? Are you going to blame me for this? Or maybe Boris? Is that it, Pierre? All this—Vendanova—is because of your hatred for Boris Kussov? You are retaliating by humiliating me, by stripping me of all dignity, because of a dead man?”
Her voice had taken an edge of hysteria. Now Pierre walked over to her, looming above her, his jaw tensed, his eyes cavernous and gleaming. “You’re always holding back from me because of that man. You take and take and take and never give me what I need. Jackie demands nothing. She’s uncomplicated. I don’t love her, but I don’t know whether I’m ready to give her up. What a relief it is to be with a woman who’s foremost a woman, and a dancer second, who doesn’t have the mentality of a goddamned prima ballerina! You have no idea.”
Natalia’s fingers twirled into her hair and tightened until the curls cut off her circulation. Her scalp burned, and she was grateful for this physical pain that obliterated her other emotions. Her face still turned to him, she said: “I have no idea. You’re right. But I shall never forgive you. it isn’t la Vendanova—she’s actually immaterial. I can’t forgive the hatred. You hate me, Pierre. But you don’t like yourself much, either, or you wouldn’t hate me so. You’re a weak, twisted man—an incomplete man, half a person.”
She looked away then, her eyes filling with tears. I can’t cry in front of him—not now, she thought. And then: This is worse than the last time, when I found him with Boris. Last time I needed to learn the truth. But now? This?
She felt his hands on her shoulders, his arms wrapping around her torso. “God, how we do this to each other,” he murmured, his voice breaking, as he buried his face in the crook of her neck. She felt his wet tears. “Don’t turn away,” he pleaded. “Don’t let me hate you. Please, Natalia, help me to be a husband to you.”
“But I never wanted you to be my husband,” she whispered. “I only wanted you to love me. To love me—not to bind yourself to me in any fashion. I did not make you send Fabiana away. You chose to do so. Don’t resent me for this marriage—it was of your own doing.”
“But not yours! How do you suppose that’s made me feel? Generally when a man wants to marry a girl, he doesn’t have to wait eight years! And when the woman becomes pregnant, it’s usually the man who is defiant. Honestly, Natalia, don’t you ever imagine what it must feel like to live inside this damned skin and know, truly know, that the woman I love never wanted to marry me, but that there was another man whom she accepted as a husband?”
“I did not marry Boris that way,” she protested lamely. “You know that the marriage came before the love. If anyone should have been jealous, it should have been Boris. I still loved you when I became his wife. That all changed later.”
“And it’s never changed back! If there hadn’t been the pregnancy, you would never have agreed to a wedding. I can’t be grateful, Natalia. Every day I am with you, you make me feel that you regret being my wife, that you think I forced you into having the child and marrying me. I own the most precious gem on earth but am not free to remove it from its case and wear it openly.”
“I am not a gem, Pierre. I’m a woman. Are things so bad between us that you need other women? Will you always need them?”
“This simply happened. Don’t go into it, Natalia. I am a man—incomplete as you think I am. You are never with me.”
“But do you really want me along? In the beginning you were right, I did not want to come. But now I feel it’s you who don’t want me—you who don’t include me in your plans!”
“It’s you who don’t wish to be a part of them,” he retaliated. “You who quarrel with Serge Pavlovitch. I am a member of his company now. I like it. For the first time without the help of kind and not so kind mentors. I’m thirty-four years old. Isn’t it right that some sort of sunshine falls on me, Natalia? What do you want?”
“I want you to love me. I want you to understand me. I want us to know each other, Pierre,” Her brown eyes sought his, and she touched his cheek. “I want your success. But I don’t want to be swallowed by you, to be second to you. There should be room for us to walk beside each other without resentment.”
He stood up abruptly, the towel at last falling from him and showing him splendidly naked, the muscles glistening with perspiration. “Words,” he said. “Words! I need to feel you, Natalia, to know you are my wife! I can’t continue to live in shadows. You’re killing me every moment we’re together. You suffocate me, tear the heart right out of me. You make me become that incomplete man, that half a person.”
In the silence that followed, Natalia’s throat was clogged and she could only draw small, strained breaths. At last she cried out: “But how? Tell me how, Pierre. Indict me, for both our sakes!”
He sank to his knees and enveloped his arms around her legs, laying his head on her lap. “I do love you,” he said, beginning to weep. “I do love you!”
But her face above him was ghastly, pallid, and hollow and full of anguish. She could not reach out to touch his hair, to mingle with his pain. At that very moment her own first sharp pain had pierced through her abdomen, the pain of her labor. “You never share,” he was accusing her. “You are always apart, always alone!”
Chapter 24
From the beginning Natalia felt excluded by Pierre and his little daughter. Tamara was plumper, stronger, and more colorful than Arkady. She lay next to her mother like a foreign object: her black curls, black eyes, and small red cheeks so totally unlike Natalia that her mother found it difficult to relate to her. She was a little Tcherkess baby, a female Pierre. Tamara Petrovna, Natalia thought. Another name, this one evocative of a Russia now torn in pieces. Thamar, fittingly, had been a ruthless, lustful Caucasian queen.
Natalia had named her daughter after her much admired friend, the dancer Karsavina. But that had been her single contribution to the child since her birth. Tamara had been born in the hotel—am I destined to keep delivering in rented bathrooms? Natalia had wondered—under the care of Dr. Combes’s associate, the tall, gallant Dr. Contini. The labor had been short: She had known what to expect this time, in spite of the suddenness of the initial pains. Perhaps this baby had pushed its way out with greater impatience, already possessing the will to live.
Natalia touched the child, the small crinkled fists, the tiny toothless mouth, like that of an old crone. Arkady was smoother than you, she thought. He was more noble, more subtle. He was fine and weak and translucent, and the world was too much for him. I had him once inside me, then in my arms. Once, too, I walked beside his father and we shared a bittersweet, poignant romance, fragile and tinged with ironies—a romance that sprang up unknown to us, a romance that enveloped us even as we still refused to believe in its possibility. Now I have a new family: you, my little one,
and your father. Yes, you shall live: I have no doubt of that. You will cling to the pleasures of the flesh the way your father does, always clamoring for more. And I will always feel that in some measure I will not fill your needs. People like me never have enough to give to those like you.
When Pierre swept into the room, his face was ecstatic, his cheekbones flushed, his eyes glowing. He was like a tornado entering Natalia’s presence. He delighted in the child but not in the same way that Boris had delighted in Arkady. To Boris, his son had simply been a miracle. He had been awed, touched, and grateful to her for having brought to life his unformed dreams. Pierre, on the other hand, relished Tamara as if she epitomized all earthly joys. She was his, and he burst with love for her, with the need to possess her and merge with her. Natalia felt that in his excitement he had forgotten her part in the formation and birth of this baby. She was jealous. At three days old, her daughter had already become the Other Woman.
Pierre was at the bright center of joy. He was happy with his creative endeavors on the ballet Parade, and now his daughter had completed his nerve-tingling awareness of the world. In this state of mind he was open to all things and all people. Those who had once found him sullen or moody now saw an ecstatic Pierre, not quite human but touched with the sublime. Natalia saw him, too, and recognized the young artist who had fallen in love with her and waited for her at the back entrance of the Mariinsky: an unreasoned young man, full of verve and imbalance, full of poetry, revelry, and mysticism. He had frightened her then; now she was disconcerted. Between his black brows were two strong lines etched in experience, and between the black curls were strands of gray, noticeable only when one stood close to him. She would wonder: How many see him from this close? And the agonies of her eighteenth year would return to haunt her. Could one ever trust a man like Pierre when he claimed to love a woman? Or was there simply too great a need to possess, too great a need for novelty and exploration?
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