Ideas of Heaven Read online

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  I laughed a little. Women did not take umbrage in any club I’d worked in.

  “I hate a giggler,” he said. “Do it again till you get it right.”

  I did the steps again. He circled around me, checking. “Your balance is bad,” he said. “Stand on your right foot and don’t move until I tell you.”

  I stood for as long as I could, swerving and dipping and regaining my center. “You have to do better than that,” he said.

  I had to jump in place for fifteen minutes without losing the beat. I had to run around the room and change direction on a dime. I had to hold a number of positions for long spells of time—a split, a high kick, a stretch to my toes with my butt in the air. All of them were exposing, implicitly sexual positions, and I felt like a crude cartoon, twisting and straining, muscles trembling. Nonetheless I was proud of my discipline in the regimen this strange maître was drilling me in. And I did get more limber.

  At my age I had no chance of getting anywhere, Fischbach said, unless I practiced at least seven hours a day. Minimum. I could not do much in my closet of a room at the Y, so I paid to use Fischbach’s studio in the evening hours. I was given a key, and I went into that room, with its old-gym smells, always afraid that he was going to appear, but he did not. My body grew lighter and trimmer. I was skipping meals to save money, as the savings I had brought with me ran lower. I had taken a vow to myself not to look for other work. I was so lonely my voice cracked from disuse when I spoke, but I was elated too in a starved and ghostly way.

  Sometimes I went to shows (or halves of shows—I walked in at intermission, the one way to go for free). Things had been changing in the theatre; the hit shows of the decade were Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. They were okay, but I liked the older ones better—Gypsy, Guys and Dolls, Oklahoma—an earlier style of full-throated, tip-tappy entertainment. Most musicals gave me pleasure, but it was not a fan’s love for them that made me knock myself out. I saw them as a way to be in a parade of dazzling motion, to be a lovely dancing version of myself, without the rawness of the clubs. The best of me (I believed) was in that lineup, slim-legged and tight-waisted, too delightful to keep under wraps. That parade, which is always passing through this world, was what I was made for, I thought. I could not bear to have it go by without me. It hurt me to think it might have slipped by already, that I might be too old. I probably was too old.

  Fischbach had other students. A few times I met women going in or out, girls with pearly lipstick and pixie bangs. Never any men. I couldn’t tell what his own desires were, which gender he liked, or whether he couldn’t stand the thought of doing anything with anybody. There was no gallantry in him—the tools of his trade were mockery and command—and he was uncharmed by femaleness in general. He was a strong dancer himself, not miraculously light on his feet but muscular and sure; his lines were always clear. He called me an oaf, a potato, a slob, a blight, a hippopotamus.

  He believed in tests for me, rehearsals of my resolve, as if the strongest desire had to win, simple as that, in any instance. “Pop quiz,” he would say. “If a director asked you to stand on your head with a dead fish in your mouth, what would you do? If someone stepped on your hand in the middle of a number, how would you act? If you were in California and had to get to a performance in New York and no planes were flying, what would you do? If your grandmother wanted you to stay at her bedside in California, what would you tell her?” There were no trick answers, but the recitation of responses was my practice in “mental clarity.”

  Sometimes I called France collect and talked to Jean-Pierre on the phone. The life I’d had there seemed cushioned and soft, a child’s tented garden. When Jean-Pierre was friendly (sometimes he was not), I would get off the phone and shed tears. I would sit in my room at the Y and have to talk myself back into doing my exercises. How had I, who had once been loved and had a home, thrown myself into this pit?

  This could not go on forever. Fischbach had forbidden me to go near any audition until he said I was ready, but I had had thirty-six sessions with him. Week after week. On Labor Day weekend he was going away (did he have friends? it was hard to imagine) and he would do a special extra-long class with me before he left on Friday afternoon.

  I was a little late, and he said, “I might have known. Do you have any idea at all what traffic is going to be like this afternoon? Any clue at all?”

  “I’ll dance fast,” I murmured brightly.

  This was the wrong joke to make, because it gave him the idea to have me do routines in double time. He hammered at the piano with his fingers angled like claws. I was beet-red and sweating heavily when we stopped.

  “Now that you’re warmed up,” he said.

  He took up a wooden yardstick from the corner. For a second I believed that he was going to hit me with it. “You know the limbo?” he said. “Did the frogs limbo in your part of La Belle Frogland?”

  He held the stick out stiffly, like a traffic gate. “Under,” he said. “Lean back. Go with your pelvis first.”

  I had done this before, as a teenager in Cincinnati. “Oops,” I said now, as I bent my knees and cakewalked under the ruler, my shoulders and head going last. It had been much jollier with a line of guffawing kids and calypso music on the hi-fi.

  “Again,” Fischbach said.

  He lowered the stick. I wriggled under. The silence was not pleasant.

  “Again,” he said. The move meant thrusting my private parts at him—that was the whole comedy of this game—and for once I was not happy to be doing that. Fischbach kept his face impassive; he looked stony and perhaps a little bored.

  “Again,” he said.

  I had to spread my knees wider to keep my footing.

  “Again,” he said.

  I tried to angle one hip lower and twist my torso under the stick, which made me lose my balance. I righted myself by holding on to Fischbach’s arm. “No,” he said, and shook me away. I skidded and landed hard on my tailbone.

  “You didn’t last very long,” he said.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Stay, don’t move. I have floor work for you.”

  He walked to the far wall. “Okay,” he said. “Come to me. On your hands and knees.”

  “What?”

  “Just a little crawling. Fast as you can. It’s a good workout. Don’t argue.”

  I was going to argue, but then he told me not to. I thought I would just get it over quickly—I put my palms flat on the floor and I lunged and scuttled forward, like a swimmer in a race. My bare knees scraped the floor, but I kept thinking I was almost there. Soon, soon. This was a nightmare, but if I did what I had to properly, it would be finished.

  “Very good,” Fischbach said, when I had reached him. “Very nice. Don’t get up, sweetheart.”

  I sat on the floor, cross-legged, waiting. Sweetheart, he said that?

  “One last thing,” he said. “Then you’re ready.” I actually nodded.

  “Lick my shoe.”

  “What?”

  “You need to do this. You pick. The right or the left.”

  He was wearing white canvas tennis shoes. I looked at his feet and I looked up at him. His face had almost no expression, but his eyes, in their hooded sockets, were fixed on me, to let me know that I had to do this. I respected (that is almost the right word) the clarity of his will. You might have thought we were both in the service of a great idea. For a moment I did think that. I lowered my head and I touched my tongue to the tip of his shoe, just once. The roughness left a dry spot on my tongue.

  I was crying, of course, when I looked up at him. Not a mild flow of tears, but helpless, snotty sobs. Fischbach stayed poker-faced. He really did believe in some theory of severity and triumph, some grand dedication, but there was nothing at its center. He did not care whether I danced or not, or whether anyone did. There was no divine substance he was burning me down to.

  While I was crying, I understood clearly that I was never going to be a dancer in any Broadway show. Not no
w, not later. I saw too that I didn’t want it so much really. It was as if I suddenly remembered a thing that had been blocked by distraction and interruption. I sat on the floor in my soaked leotard and I was sick with disappointment to be someone who didn’t want this.

  My crying naturally disgusted Fischbach, although it could not have been a surprise to him, I could not have been the first to break down in his studio. (Unless I was the first he was able to push that far, a truly painful thought.) “Okay, okay. We’re done,” he said.

  He went over and rolled the casing down on the piano keys. I could see that he was trying to carry out these last moments with what he thought of as style. “Get your stuff together,” he said. “I’m in a hurry. Don’t dawdle like you do.”

  He got his dungaree jacket off the chair and put it on, tugging at the bottom of it and turning up the collar. “Are you listening?” he said. “Move it. Chop-chop. It’s time.” He seemed pathetic to me, bossing around a woman who was stretched out on the floor in a fit of weeping. Where could that ever get him? I didn’t move—that was my one tiny piece of resistance—and he said, “I’m waiting.” He stood over me for some minutes. At last he said, “Never mind. You can lock up when you leave.” I left the door open, in fact, and I never mailed him the keys either.

  AND SO I went back to Jean-Pierre. He met my plane in Paris, and he looked wonderful to me, with his soft eyes and his cropped sandy hair, his topcoat flapping in the wind. He seemed very happy to see me, and he didn’t rebuke me or ask me terrible questions. Later he was less kind. His family never treated me with any warmth after I came back.

  Everyone did notice how slender and strong I was. I could not explain to them how I had stretched and kicked and plié ’d and tied myself in knots in that stuffy studio, tearing and rebuilding the muscle fibers, pushing myself past the threshold of strain. Once I was back in Brittany, those hours in the studio seemed heroic—I seemed heroic, in my submission to the regimen, my single-pointed efforts. And for what? For a vision that was laughable even to me and had made me come back ashamed.

  But I did come back a less silly woman. I did not plague Jean-Pierre about things he could do nothing about. And I tried to keep up my training. I would put on a record of Wonderful Town! and strut across the kitchen floor to Rosalind Russell. My niece and her friends, who saw me through the window, wanted me to teach them. I began to give lessons to little girls in “jazz dancing” and also tap, which they requested. I liked children and might have had them with Jean-Pierre if we had gotten along better. I could get my class looking like a line of Shirley Temples, all shuffling-off-to-Buffalo in their patent leather shoes, merry and mostly in step, and afterwards I helped them on with their little coats.

  When the class got too big for any room in our house, I rented a room in the mairie, where the town’s municipal offices were. It was quite a grand room, with molded plaster garlands along the ceiling and a nice parquet floor. It tickled me to have “The Pajama Game” pouring through its august spaces. Adults wanted to come too to the class, so I had an evening group of solid housewives and lithe young office workers and even a few men. I was a fad, perhaps, but people had fun.

  I could not have lived on what I made from my dance classes, but they kept me afloat. Some girls came year after year, and their sisters too. Every fall I worried I wouldn’t have students, but I always did. And I was allied with what Americans used to call physical culture. I went hiking in the valley of the Rance, I went to Paris for yoga weekends. Jean-Pierre laughed the first time he saw me in hiking boots; he said I looked like a Valkyrie in shorts.

  I liked my muscles more than he did, and they weren’t ungainly either. The littlest girls used to beg me to show them a grande jetée—and I could jump and land without much thud or bobble even in the later years. The classes were the best part of my week. When Jean-Pierre fell in love with someone else and we split up at last, I was not altogether at a loss. I had something I could do, an occupation. I could not, however, stay in the town.

  I went to Paris, to brood and idle for a few weeks before going home to the States. It was not a happy time. I was appalled to think my marriage really was broken forever and I was sorry for the messes we had made. I walked through the whole city of Paris, from Sacré-Coeur to Montparnasse, from the Chaillot Palace to the Jardin des Plantes, trying as hard as I might (not hard enough) to keep from stuffing myself with food and drinking a whole bottle of wine every night. I chatted too much with waiters and ticket-takers and all the people in my yoga class.

  We were doing the shoulder stand in yoga when I kicked someone behind me by mistake. He was a very polite Parisian in his late forties, who told me not to worry for a single second, it was good for his health to get clipped in the jaw now and then. I was not usually that clumsy. We whispered back and forth about how this was a more dangerous sport than soccer, but at least (he said) you didn’t have violent yoga fans. After class he took me out for a very good lunch.

  I liked him right away, most people did. He was a history teacher in a lycée, a widower with a grown son, with an interest in Zen Buddhism and Duke Ellington. I stayed in Paris because of him—Giles was his name—one week longer and then another week. People say Paris is expensive but you can get by if you know how. After it was plain that I was not going to leave the city anytime soon, I began to teach beginners’ classes in the yoga studio. I was living with Giles by then in the 7th arrondissement, in an old apartment with a rocky sofa and an armoire as big as a stable.

  We had a simple, almost rustic life. In the evenings we stayed in, without TV or too much outside company; we read and we listened to music. On weekends we had pique-niques in the park when the weather was good, or we played long, companionable rounds of honeymoon bridge. You might have thought we were old people, except that the sex was frank and lively. Quite lively.

  Sometimes in the early days I went with him to talks by one of his Buddhist teachers, although they never really seized my imagination. I did learn to meditate, and the followers were certainly a smart group. Giles never pressed any of his enthusiasms on me, except for a habit of buying me cheap Japanese sandals, which he insisted on liking. How could a person scold him? He was always able to consider the most outlandish idea without arguing and was unshocked by anything I told him.

  Ten years after we first started living together, I went home to the States to visit. My family made a fuss and then ignored me. I had become one of those ex-pats who didn’t know who David Letterman was and who held her knife and fork like a European. When I flew back to Paris a week early, I told everyone I was never leaving France again. Giles’s son called me la convertie.

  At the yoga school we always got a number of Americans in the classes, and I could see they envied my unfazed command of this city and its folkways. It amused me that I of all people had become some worldly personage with good bearing and a forthright gaze, like a type out of Henry James.

  I might have turned out a lot worse. I tried not to be vain around the students, not to be some fluttery old bird in draw-string pants. I worried about Giles’s health, which was not as strong as it might have been. Otherwise my complaints were truly minor. When Giles had a heart attack last summer, I came to know clearly what minor was.

  I was not always good during his illness. In the hospital, I cried out when I saw the tubes clamped over his nostrils. On my visits, I held his hand and gazed at him, while everyone else chattered to him in their usual voluble way. In our apartment I didn’t want to answer the door or the phone. I wouldn’t go outside at all, except to visit Giles. People came to check on me—Liane, the head of the yoga studio, and Giles’s son and his wife. “Get up now,” Liane said. “Get yourself dressed.” What a nuisance I was to everyone, what trouble.

  When Giles came home again I was better. I cleaned myself up, I cleaned the house. I nestled on the couch with him, I brought him cups of tisane, I went out to shop. And I went back to teaching yoga, which helped me greatly. The difficulty of cert
ain poses was especially useful. I had to concentrate and I had to be exact. Giles himself got lively again within a few weeks and claimed he felt the same as before. Better even.

  In the months right after he was ill, when I’d begun working again, I began practicing a kind of Tibetan meditation called tonglen. In its later levels, you send relief and spaciousness, on your outtake of breath, to someone who has done you an injury. Naturally I picked Duncan Fischbach. I have never had another enemy. I’m sure no thought of me has crossed his mind for decades; I was one clumsy student among many for him. How our limits vexed him. He couldn’t bear how little we could do. Broken athlete, he must be now, empty shell—who would need relief sent more than he would? I sit with my famous bust rising and falling as I breathe; he would laugh if he saw me. But I do think of him, in short spells and sometimes longer.

  THE HIGH ROAD

  My whole life, it always made me crazy when people weren’t sensible. Dancers, for instance, have the worst eating habits. I can’t begin to say how many anorexic little girls I used to have to hold up onstage, afraid they were going to faint on me any minute.

  I myself was lean and tight and healthy in those days. I went out with different women, and I married one of them. I don’t know why she married me, I was never kind to her, but women did not expect much then. She was probably a better dancer than I was too. I left her, after a lot of nasty fights and spite on both sides, and I went and had my life with men. It was a dirty, furtive, sexy life then—this was before Stonewall—but it had its elations. Infatuation, when it happened, could be visionary, a lust from another zone. From the true zone, the molten center of the earth. I was in my twenties, listening to a lot of jazz, and I thought in phrases like that.

  Andre, my lover, was in fact a musician, a trumpeter with a tender, earnest sound, sweet like Chet Baker, although he would have liked to be as intense as Miles. Well, who wouldn’t? I had been with men before him, but only one-night pickups, those flickering hallucinations that were anything but personal. When I met Andre, we were not in a bar but at a mixed party, and we had to signal each other cautiously and make a lot of conversation first. Andre was no cinch to talk to either. Other white people thought he was gruff or scornful but actually he was really quite shy.