She stiffened. “I went out, to the Château Caucasien.”
“Alone? Are you mad, Galina?”
His eyes were wide. She took a deep breath and met them with her own level blue gaze. “No,” she answered quietly. “I’m not mad at all. Just lonely. You go out—all the time, it seems. What’s wrong with my doing the same thing? You forget that before I came to you and Natalia, I’d been on my own for years! I am not a child, Pierre.”
“No,” he said, “you are not a child.” Then his voice rose: “Perhaps if you were, it would be safer! Don’t you understand, Galina, that you’re a very beautiful young woman, and that any man would be justified in making advances toward you? Don’t you see yourself at all?”
“It’s you who are mad!” she cried out then and started to walk up the stairs, bending her head in a sudden clash of emotions. “Sometimes I don’t like you, Pierre, sometimes you are unfair and cruel and you degrade me! Leave me alone—I don’t want to speak to you. You were so rude to that poor man, that nice good man, when if you love me, you should have been grateful! I don’t understand you, not at all!”
“That man was kissing you,” Pierre retorted savagely, taking her arm to prevent her from running up the stairway.
“Kissing me? As a friend, as a brother! Don’t make it sound so sordid and shameful, Pierre! For God’s sake, you’re behaving as if—yes!—as if you were jealous! Jealous of some stranger who was kind, who—”
“I don’t want to hear another word about your stranger! Not one word, Galina! Jealous? Yes, yes, of course, I’m jealous! What do you expect me to be?”
Slowly she wheeled about, and her pocketbook fell to the bottom of the stairs, unnoticed. Her oval face shone white and stunned in the light, her lips parted and her blue eyes intent on his face, which she seemed to be seeing for the first time. He took a half-step backward, color rising to his cheeks, his eyes staring at her with a kind of wild agitation. It was as if he suddenly was realizing what he had said. She did not move, and his arms began to tremble, his breath to come in staccato gulps.
For a moment they remained frozen in space, the girl and the man, and neither one could think or act. Then he clenched his fists and pounded them together, and compressed his lips. She whispered, “I—” but the words stopped coming, and her face flooded with shame, with horror. But she could not look away from him, or he from her, from the riveting azure blue of her eyes.
Then at last she made a furtive movement and turned her back on him, fleeing up the stairs, her blond hair bouncing in back of her like a mantle of fur. Only then did tears well up in his eyes and spill down his cheeks.
Chapter 28
I shall have to deal with it later, Natalia thought, annoyed with herself, with Galina, with Diaghilev, and with Pierre. Demands on her were pressing from all directions, and there seemed to be no reserve for herself in which to regain her peace of mind. She was preparing Les Noces, trying to work her ideas into Stravinsky’s composition, but finding that, although his music was the perfect inspiration, its stops and starts, its breakdown in structure, were contrary to the continuous flow she wished to achieve. At least Pierre’s new designs were what she wanted: simple, stark. The set was to be a white stage with a door to the back, through which the public would catch glimpses of the nuptial bed heaped with pillows. The costumes were two-toned, breeches and tunics for the men, and shirts and jumperlike dresses for the women, all purely functional.
Natalia understood the point of Stravinsky’s music, of his decision to include only percussion instruments. Singers would be raised to the stage like a kind of chorus, to echo the mood of the theme. Natalia had seen peasant weddings in the Crimea, hence her tableaux had a bitter reality, which Diaghilev had envisioned when first discussing the ballet with her. Life flowed through the wedding preparations: a continuing, fatalistic life, with its brief climax of festivity. To those who ran a farm, who toiled incessantly to grow vegetables and raise livestock, a wedding was functional, not the culmination of romantic love. For Natalia, everything came down to weaving and interweaving groups of dancers: the bride’s friends, the groom’s cohorts, the older marriage guests. She could imagine the girl’s family, resigned to yielding their daughter to the groom’s, and the bride’s own fear as she prepared to leave their loving cocoon. The bridegroom, who was insecure: What did having a wife really mean? The couple as objects of a tradition, marrying a person chosen by the parents. The bride’s friends moving around her on either side, bending inward as if braiding her long tresses in a touching ritual of female caring. The boy’s male friends forming two lines encircling him, their hands meeting over his head to form a passageway: homage to the one who was about to enter matrimony. An older couple warming the nuptial bed. This was a wedding symbolic of illiterate rusticity, yet beautiful in what it said about the continuity of life among those who worked in routines of drudgery. Natalia planned her groups, her floor patterns, her gentle pulling apart and juxtaposing in geometric arrangements. This, finally, was imagination: the assimilation of reality into an artistic expression.
Bending over the sheets of paper on which she would diagram her desired positions, Natalia worked day after day in Monte Carlo. Tamara was with her, as was Mademoiselle. Natalia was truly making an effort with her daughter, to include her in her plans, to take walks with her, to teach her simple dance steps based on the five positions, which the small girl had learned at four.
Still, it did not go well. It was as if Tamara, her black eyes defiant, was punishing her mother for months and months of involvement elsewhere. “No, I don’t want to dance now,” she would say irritably. “Mama, this is my time to swim, don’t you remember?”
Natalia would look guiltily at Mademoiselle, whose raised eyebrows were a clear indication that the child, not the mother, was right again. Children, my dear Madame, need their routines.
At night Natalia would silently tiptoe into Tamara’s room and watch her sleep. She would sit on the small bed, her heart flowing with sudden tenderness, and her fingers would touch the peach skin, the soft black lashes. My child, my child. I do love you, even if I can’t always show it the way you want. How little I know you! How little we know each other, or forgive each other. Maybe someday …But it had to be today, didn’t it? Or it would be too late.
There was a desperation about Natalia that spring, a nervous frenzy of love that Tamara could not understand. She did not know how to handle it. A baby still, flailing about in the sea of human emotions, she did the only thing she knew how to do: She tensed against this outpouring, hardened herself against her mother. More than ever, Natalia felt totally rejected by her.
Then Galina unexpectedly arrived at the rented villa, adding her own confusion to the general chaos in the household. “For God’s sake,” Natalia muttered, dropping her pen and diagram on her secretary and coming out into the hall. Then she saw Galina’s face, her willowy body huddled oddly upon itself like a frightened animal.
“Will you let me stay?” the girl pleaded, shyly averting her hurt eyes.
“Yes, yes, how can you ask?” Natalia answered, putting her arms around her. “Tamara will be so glad to see you.” This remark proved painfully true. That same day Natalia saw them walking hand in hand in the garden, stopping once in a while for Galina to point something out to her small playmate.
Tamara said later to her mother: “Do you know what I love best about Galya? She hugs so well. We hold and we hold and we hold, and she never goes away.”
Natalia cried silently into her pillow that night, not knowing that Tamara, shivering, had gone into Galina’s bed whimpering: “I missed you, I missed you. Mama always wants to talk to me when I’m playing, or she wants to play complicated games when I feel like being by myself. I don’t always like Mama, d’you know, Galina? I don’t always like Mama.”
When Natalia returned to Paris with her daughter and niece, Pierre’s presence in the house could be felt in every room. Natalia saw signs of his restlessness in the h
alf-finished painting on an easel in the master bedroom, could feel his spirit needing to break out in the very chaos of his closet, where ruffled shirts lay scattered in a litter of reckless hedonism. He’s been doing the cabarets, she thought, reliving his golden youth in St. Petersburg, spending money as casually as if he were a young prince of high standing at the Tzarist court. She saw evidence of his confusion and despair, and it reverberated inside her. He’s gone away from me, she thought. Something has come to take him away from his very self, something cataclysmic.
Galina saw all this, too, in her own way. She saw it, felt it, and crept away, as if Pierre’s sickness were catching, as if she was afraid of him. But he ignored her. Sometimes at breakfast she would announce plans to have dinner with a friend—and sometimes, too, she would throw in the name of some young man, looking at Pierre from under her golden lashes. He shrugged it off. You’re a big girl. Amuse yourself the way you see fit, his eyes told her, their cutting edge a singularly painful blow.
Then, one afternoon, he entered Tamara’s room, where Galina had come to put away the small girl’s sweater, and there was no avoiding him. Birds chirped evening songs outside, young buds on the trees threw long, dappled shadows on the soft carpet. It was a lazy afternoon, and the oddly empty house seemed lazy, too, with Tamara and her governess out, Natalia at a rehearsal, and the servants otherwise occupied. Galina felt her mouth dry up, and she pressed her hands together. ‘They’re at the Bois de Boulogne,” she said aimlessly, staring at his feet, resplendent in shiny black moccasins.
“So where are you going? Plans for tonight, my sweet?”
Her eyes filled with tears at his tone of bitter irony. Why do you hate me? she thought, although deep inside she already knew the answer. It was inescapable. “We used to be such good friends, Pierre,” she murmured in misery. “Let me go, please.”
He opened his hands, palms up, and smiled. There was no mirth in his face. “I’m hardly holding you, am I?” he said.
The strong blue of her eyes suddenly shone at him. She was speaking through those extraordinary eyes, saying—saying what? Resenting him. “Look,” he stated, anger forming deep within him and slowly rising, “you’re the one who ran off to Monaco, weren’t you? Playing all those silly games, day after day? Do whatever you want, Galina, but don’t involve me. Your Uncle Boris was the game player, not I. I don’t give a damn whom you see—whether you sleep with every male friend you have—”
“Stop it!” She had balled her hands into fists and stood shaking. “Don’t say anything. Just—don’t say it!”
“Fine,” he answered shortly, “I won’t.” He turned around and walked out, and she continued to stand, trembling. Then suddenly he was back, framed in Tamara’s doorway. “I want you to tell me what it is you want,” he said.
“I want it to be the way it was before,” she replied, looking at him again. “I want you to care.”
“You want a perfect world.” He stepped inside the room, and now his voice was warmer, less hostile.
She bit her lower lip and absently picked up Tamara’s sweater. She said nothing and instead tried to leave the room. He caught the sleeve of her blouse and stopped her. “Don’t tease me,” he said, very softly now, drawing her to his chest and enclosing her within his arms. He rested his chin on the top of her head and said again: “Don’t tease me. I’m too old for that, and it’s hardly fair. But if you do sleep with anyone, I don’t want to know, I’m not that kind of friend. You can’t have it both ways, Galina.”
Gently but firmly, he pushed her away from his chest, tilted up her chin. She was tall, a golden tulip, he had often thought. His finger caressed her cheek, drew an outline of her brow. There was so much sadness in his face that she had to look aside, suddenly overcome with embarrassment. He looked so old, so ... old and his face was a living wound.
“I must go,” she said, and pushed past him hurriedly.
On the evening of Bastille Day, July 14, Les Noces premièred at the Théâtre de la Gaîté-Lyrique in Paris. Natalia did not dance in her own production this time. It was too important; too much needed to be supervised at the last minute. Her ballet, with its chorus seconding the dancers, was unfolding as planned on Pierre’s plain stage with walls giving onto a door through which the spectators could see a bed strewn with pillows. The groups of wedding guests and family members moved with a graceful heaviness, in one direction and then another, meshing together in clusters. Natalia watched from the sides, her heart pounding in her throat, fear and excitement drying her lips and moistening her palms. More than the ill-fated Sleeping Princess, presented at the wrong time to the wrong audience, more than Renard, a tiny jewel hidden in the vastness of its setting, this production would establish or destroy her reputation as an innovative choreographer. So much depended on this performance.
When it was over, Natalia knew that she had scored a triumph. The Parisians greeted her work with unabated enthusiasm, and she felt her fear dissolve, joy replace it.
The stars of the Ballet had been invited to a party given by some brilliant young American expatriates. Now she encouraged Galina to join the group. Pierre said nothing. Hesitantly, like a scared rabbit, Galina looked up at him and then down at her feet. “I’m too young, and I’d be out of place,” she said awkwardly.
“Let her go home if she wants to,” Pierre cut in abruptly, rearing his head in a gesture of annoyance, contempt. He began to move away, and Galina suddenly looked up into Natalia’s face and colored brightly:
“All right,” she said, somewhat breathlessly. “I’ll come!”
During the drive Pierre’s mood began to worry Natalia. After all, Les Noces had been his victory as well as hers: He had designed the sets! “We’ve won, darling,” she whispered to him, but in his preoccupation he seemed not to have heard. Something lurched in her heart.
At the party it was even worse. Natalia saw him move toward a back room just as she was being surrounded by their old friends Stravinsky, Gontcharova, Diaghilev, and Georges Auric, who had been playing one of the four pianos that had accompanied the singers and dancers. Through the crowd she could see Pierre’s retreating back, his bent head. The joy died inside her, and her eyes began to glitter with a kind of brittle pretense. This was her night, a celebration. All her life she had been waiting for this, all the long years. “Yes, give me more champagne,” she said and heard the false excitement in her voice and hated it, hated herself, hated him, and was afraid.
She looked around for Galina, suddenly apprehensive lest the girl feel left out, unwanted. “Has anyone seen my niece?” she asked.
“Not since we came in,” Diaghilev replied. He was smiling at her, his monocle reflecting her own small self, clothed elegantly in a long, straight gown of metallic blue, strands of pearls around her neck falling to her waist. “It’s remarkable,” he continued, “how much she is like Boris. Tonight in that black outfit she was more like him than ever.”
“So young to mourn,” Auric said with a half-smile.
“Not really. She has many for whom to mourn,” Natalia countered. “But somehow I don’t think that’s why she chose the black. I think Galina’s trying to tell us something: ‘Look out, people, I’m grown up now!’”
Someone was edging his way into the group. Natalia looked over the rim of her coupe and saw the brown hair rising like a crest over a high forehead with rugged lines, saw green-gold eyes, and parted her lips with an expression of joy and a small tingle at the bottom of her spine. “Stuart!” she cried. “You’re here?”
“To gratify Monsieur Diaghilev, I should answer, ‘No, I’m his shadow,’” Markam replied, laughing. He bent over and kissed Natalia on the cheek, then turned to greet the impresario. But now there was a new dynamic to the group, and it began to reform. Diaghilev, his sharp eyes appraising the American writer and his choreographer, was repositioning himself so that now he, and not Natalia, was at the center of the group. The dancer and her friend stood on the outside, smiling at each other.
She took his arm, and they walked to a corner of the enormous reception room. “I met your niece a few months ago,” Stuart said. “Did she tell you about it? At the Château Caucasien? I even saw your house and had a brief encounter with some man whom I assumed to be your husband. Tell me, does he always greet his guests with scowls and shouts of anger?”
“I don’t know anything about this,” Natalia said, feeling suddenly cold in the warm room.
“Oh? Well then, I assume it wasn’t very important. How are you? Apart from the stage, I mean.”
“I’m quite well. All right. But what’s this about Galina and Pierre? And why didn’t you come to see me if you were in Paris all this time?”
He raised his eyebrows quizzically and shook his head. “I helped Galina rid herself of some silly college boys, and Pierre was not amused. I don’t think he took my chivalry the way it was offered. As for you, my dear—I’ve followed you about in the papers, and I’ve always been proud of your accomplishments. But it’s not easy to forget. A friendship such as ours leaves its share of scars. I did love you, you know. Now it’s been seven years, and no, I haven’t moped about playing the romantic young fool, beating his breast while another man makes off with his fair maiden. But still, Natalia, you can’t expect it not to hurt, being in the same city and being reminded daily that you are here with someone else.”
She bit her lower lip, suddenly embarrassed. Wordlessly, she shook her head. He patted her shoulder and said, with amusement: “It’s all right. Life goes on. This Trojan prince never did get his Helen, but think of the carnage we avoided! We’ll always be friends, Natalia. That’s one of the reasons why I came tonight. I wanted to congratulate you, and to see you again. But for a girl who’s just won at bingo, you don’t look very happy. What’s up?”
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