Colum McCann - Dancer

In the bar on the corner of Castro I suspended myself from the balcony while the boy unzipped me and performed his quiet miracle. He was the same height as Erik and blond also. I almost pulled a shoulder muscle, hanging from the balcony so long. I suggested we return to the hotel for a friendly nap.

The Canova statue: $47,000. (Mrs. Godstalk!)

Warhol says the run-up to my thirty-second birthday will be like the final days of the Roman empire. He has ordered a red vinyl jockstrap for the occasion, which he may well wear outside his trousers. I couldn’t help thinking that he will fade away into obscurity. His fashionability is waning. (Being around him is like inhaling one of those ridiculous poppers.)

At the post-party party the nude ice sculptures began to melt. There was a cake baked in the shape of an ass — marzipan dimples and creative icing. I blew out the thirty-three candles (one for luck) but then Truman Capote jumped up on the table in his frock coat, flung off his white hat, and planted his face into the cake, came up miming a pubic hair between his teeth.

Victor collapsed from exhaustion and was rushed to the hospital. Later he came into Studio 54 with the intravenous drip still in his arm. He guided the metal stand through the dance floor under the flashing lights. Soon everyone was cheering and applauding and whistling.

Victor bowed and took a booth in the far corner, readjusted the dripbag, and tried to buy everyone a drink before he collapsed once again. (He would have loved it if he could have seen himself being carried out by none other than Steve.)

Margot says, Slow down.

I told her that the countless small devils (sex, money, desire) mean nothing to me when stacked against the angel of dance.

Sasha fell in the park, it seems. Heart attack. Tonight I stayed late, sent everyone home, danced him alive.

Wandered into a courtyard where the last blacksmith in Paris was shoeing his first horse of the day. He allowed me to sit on the wall and watch him. The horse’s leg in his hand and sparks at his feet.

Telegram and flowers for Xenia.

Fuck! The ankle just seemed to go out from underneath me. (Sasha all those years ago: What, are you not friends with your body anymore, Rudi? ) Three months recovery, Emilio said. In exactly four days I will throw the crutches into Central Park.

(three in fact!)

Two long weeks recovering on St. Bart’s. No phone calls, nothing. It was so hot that the rain over the sea evaporated before it hit the water. Clouds of yellow butterflies rose from the trees. The world was far away and small.

The locals get up with the early light to work on their flower beds. Erik said the old men have a better life than the flowers — they have even less to do and can move to the shade when they desire. (Such a strange thing to say.)

After dinner he vomited in the bath. Food poisoning, he said. The housemaid cleaned him up. In his bathroom kit there were bottles of painkillers. In bed we turned back to back. He ground his teeth and kicked. By dawn the sheets were damp with sweat.

Photo from Tamara. Her heavy breasts, her stocky trunk, her abbreviated legs, how Russian she has become.

Twenty-four repetitions instead of twelve. Emilio has increased the weights and each day he measures the muscle. We walk the streets with the weight strapped to my ankle. The convict walk. Soon to be back dancing. Never before has he seen anybody recover so quickly.

Whole mornings doing massage. Hip extension. Torso twist. Hamstrings. Most of all my thighs and calves. He hangs my feet off the end of the table to prevent cramping and grows angry if I try to read a book on the special stand.

He says he can tell the plot of whatever I’m reading just by running his hands along my spine.

Perhaps the leg is stronger than ever before. The crowd in Verona, under the stars, give a twenty-minute standing ovation, even through a late drizzle. No word from Erik. The Chicago Sun-Times said he looked pale and, when he withdrew, the announcement was intestinal flu.

Margot has figured that we have danced together, in total, almost five hundred nights and she says to hell with it, she will go on, she will try for seven hundred, a lucky number!

Emilio’s cure for insomnia: Pour water on your wrist, dab it gently with a towel, return to bed, warm your hands beneath your armpits.

Our final quarrel surely. Every piece of china was smashed except the teapot, which Erik cradled to his stomach. He lit a cigarette in the doorway, still holding the pot. When I turned away he dropped the teapot without even the hint of emotion. Good-bye. A stinging finality to it.

Gillian said it was inevitable. I slammed the phone down. I do not need to be told. Margot was with Tito in Panama. No answer. Victor came to listen, took a flight all the way. My head was reeling.

Tried getting through to Mother but all the lines were down.

It begins with scarves, dark ones bought at the Missoni store on rue du Bac; gradually, over the years, he gets to know the store owners so well that they open for him alone on a Sunday morning. The scarves become brighter, more patterned, until he is so famous they are an advertisement, unpaid for, some of them smuggled home to his sister and mother, who find them loud and gaudy. In London a Saville Row tailor makes him a high-collared tunic, a Nehru, not unlike the one he wore in school, except it is cashmere, and it is his joke to say that this is how he feels inside, cash-a-mear, spoken like three words accidentally met. In Vienna he buys a Rococo-style Murano glass chandelier with fifty-five lights and twenty replacement bulbs. In Cairo he finds a pair of antique Persian slippers. In Rabat he kneels on carpets made for him by a blind Morrocan man to whom he tells the story of the Leningrad choreographer who listened so intently to floorboards. The Moroccan loves the story so much that he repeats it to other customers, so the story shifts and changes as it makes its way through living rooms around the world, told and retold, the choreographer becoming a dancer from Moscow, or a Siberian musician, even a deaf-mute Hungarian ballerina, so that years later he hears the story, distorted, and he bangs on the dinner table and shocks everyone silent with the words: Horseshit! That’s horseshit! He was from Leningrad and his name was Dmitri Yachmennikov!

He buys antique English bookshelves and folding tables. Romanian glassware hundreds of years old. An imperial dinner set from Austria. An Argentinean folding desk. Stained glass from a church in Bavaria. Iron crosses smuggled out of Czechoslovakia. A series of crucifixes by an artist in Vatican City. An intricately carved mirror from Chile, which he gives as a present to a stagehand from Santiago. He acquires musical scores handwritten in the 1930s for Vera Nemtchinova, pores over them late at night, teaching himself how to read the scores, how to hum them into his occasional insomnia. He orders maps drawn by a Soviet émigré in Mexico City, with the Republic of Bashkir firmly seated at the center, the town of Ufa finally finding a place for itself in cartography. One map is created for each of his homes, so eventually he has seven, a lucky number to him. The maps hang in gilded frames with a special nonreflecting glass. In Athens he buys a first-century Roman marble torso after the Diadumenos of Polykleitos, the body slightly chipped at the rib cage. His Virginia farmhouse has cabinet shelves that display precious carvings from Ghana. He buys Olga Spessivtzeva’s slippers, shows them to his maker in Covent Garden, who learns a new stitch from them. On Madison Avenue in New York City he haggles over a Charles Meynier painting, Wisdom Defending Youth Against Love. He carries the painting back to his apartment in the Dakota rather than pay the extra hundred dollars for delivery.