Colum McCann - Dancer

Rock Hudson came to the green room, shirt ambitiously undone. He said he was shooting some movie somewhere and sat in the dressing room while I applied make-up. He mentioned that he had found a restaurant with the most perfect oysters in the world, he would see me after the show if I desired. I caught a glimpse of him in the audience. He was turned away from the stage, looking at someone through binoculars.

At the restaurant Rock was loath to pay the bill since I had brought fourteen people with me (ha!). He went to the bathroom and came back re-energized.

In the museum café we fought about the impulse for Albrecht. Frederic suggested that intuition was an excuse. He tried shoring up his plate of shit with a quote from Goethe who said that nothing belongs to Nature once the artist has chosen it as his subject. As if that is even mildly relevant!

I threw my coffee at him but later in the Sobel Hotel at the bottom of the Kings Road (yet another Kings Road!) I thought perhaps he was just frightened by the enormity of the task. I sent him a telegram, charging it to the hotel bill.

Such fine choreography. (At last he learned his lesson.) For the second act he showed us a photograph of a kingfisher tossing its prey in the air after stabbing it, both bird (alive) and fish (dead) gloriously turning in midair.

The Persian rug was worth eighteen thousand francs. The owner saw me admire it and then said it was mine — for free. Erik said the first thing I would do is set up a model train on it, which is not entirely true. The owner seemed disturbed, his great gift cheapened, so I said that a journalist from Vogue was coming to my apartment and I’d mention the name of his store. He beamed and took out his business card with great formality.

Outside I threw the card into the gutter. Erik was horrified to see the owner staring at us through the window.

The woman in the Jacuzzi complained about my feet, said they were cracked and anyone with an open wound was not allowed in. I told her who I was and she smiled stiffly, sat up in the water, left shortly thereafter.

Beckett was at the café counter. He nodded hello. He was pouring his coffee into his cognac, rather than the other way around.

Somebody said I should smoke the marijuana cigarette, that even Brigitte Bardot might seem humorous if I was high. Even then I had no interest. Why lose the mind, even worse the body?

At home I sought refuge in Richter. His mischief. It is said that he can stretch his hands to twelfth.

Margot’s ligament tore. Antony asked her how she felt: Rather sore, I’m afraid.

The search for a replacement. Evelyn has been told in no uncertain terms that her performance is shit, there is far too much marking in her movement, that if she is to be worthy of Basil, if she is to dance at all, she will have to learn to perform at least a half-decent grand jeté. She warmed up for a full hour and then bourréed out onto the floor. She soared high and arched her back so far that her nose actually touched her calf, like a scissor blade meeting the round thumbhole. It was as if she had no bones at all. Then she snapped her legs together with wonderful violence. I could only applaud. She picked up her bag (full of barbiturates?) to leave.

She was so elegant throwing the scarf over her shoulder that I offered to partner her for the rest of eternity, but already the elevator door was closing, ah well. (Perhaps I really did feel something for her, but the truth is we are apples and oranges.)

A call from Gilbert. The suicide notion. If you don’t come back soon, Rudi, I will leave a gap between the floor and my feet. His wife, it seems, has taken to bed in distress.

I told Ninette that, as a Tatar, I had spent centuries contemplating the gap between floor and feet. She shot back that she was Irish and had already spent hundreds of years in the air.

Mrs. Godstalk is almost a perfect copy of Madame B., except she once danced with Balanchine and now keeps her old toe shoes in the freezer, as if she will one day dance again. She took me to Madison Avenue at eight in the morning, before the antique shops opened. She said she would buy anything I wanted, even put it on an airplane to Paris rather than shipping it.

I suggested the Russian library chair in the shop on Sixty-third. It cost perhaps four years or more of Soviet wages. Later in the afternoon the envelope arrived with confirmation of purchase. What an idiotic cunt she is! She phoned eight times in three days until I used a pay phone in the rehearsal corridor and said in a French accent that Monsieur Nureyev had run off with her white poodle to serve it sautéed to the corps, who were all broke and very hungry.

(Margot laughed so hard she began hiccuping.)

Later in a moment of stupidity I reduced the chair to kindling. I called Mrs. Godstalk to say it had happened when a box of books fell from the shelf, shattering the legs. She sighed, said she was not naïve but that it was all right, she understood the artistic impulse.

Truth: I rope them in, then lock the gate and walk away laughing. Not very human, but true. The other voice says: Fuck them, they have far more money than sense.

Another call from Gilbert. The suicide notion yet again. There was the thought of returning to Paris, fucking him, then lending him a rope.

Margot was so happy with her recovery, she was smiling to herself and saying how warm the night was and did I see the old man in the orchestra seats, that was Bernardo Bertolucci.

The bewildered cockroach (it was New York, after all) crawled through the resin box. I nailed him with Margot’s spare toe shoe. The orchestra was tuning up and it drowned out most of her screaming. But she managed to laugh when I flicked the dead roach under the curtain down into the pit near the contrabasses.

The doctor, Guillaume, said it was absurd and dangerous, but I danced through the fever anyway. Hard to believe, but even the stagehands interrupted their poker game to watch the solo, presumably waiting for me to collapse, but I danced better than ever, could feel the fever vaulting out of me. Afterwards my temperature was almost normal. Guillaume stood there perplexed. The stagehands brought me a bag of ice.

Pneumonia. Erik rubbed goose fat on my chest. A full recovery inside two days.

On the phone Mother’s voice was old and sad, even when I told her about the goose fat. She was coughing. I went walking afterwards in Mendocino along the cliff face. The seals were hacking into the air. (Later Saul called to say he had almost doubled my money on the gold market. He interpreted my silence as joy.)

At first Erik was dancing like three buckets of shit, but then he braided his feet back and forth in the air beautifully, without losing any definition, and I thought, We all keep certain secrets, don’t we? For the entrechat-huit (reversed, with the eight beats descending) he paused for a second midair. Glorious. One could feel the audience straining forward. (You can tell how good the work is from the way it shapes itself into the crowd.) I was first to my feet for the encore. The whole house followed. Erik smiled, took Violette’s hand, and they bowed together.

Backstage he was listening to Liszt’s Concerto number 1, Richter with Kondrashin and the LSO. We drank Château d’Yquem. It seemed like a perfect night but after taking off his shoes, he looked pained and began rubbing his feet ferociously, then said he thought he might have chipped a bone in his toe after a particularly big sauté. (Liszt once played piano with a slight fracture in his left hand and said he could literally feel the notes skipping from bone to bone.)

No breakages nor fractures, but at the hospital the doctor told Erik that his feet were ruined, he might not be able to walk properly as an old man. Erik shrugged and laughed. Ah well, I’ll just have to bourrée along instead.