Colum McCann - Dancer

he once saw a doctor who was amazed Victor was alive let alone healthy, he should have been dead years ago, and Victor said to him, A man’s life, if it’s a good life, is older than himself, a saying the doctor liked so much he tacked it on the wall of his Park Avenue practice and gave Victor two hundred blank prescription sheets free of charge

and soon Victor is out of the bathroom and Rudi appears also, emerging from his bedroom as if nothing has happened, gliding through the living room in a beautiful white long-collared shirt, tight white jeans, snakeskin shoes, without even so much as a smile for Victor, but Victor doesn’t care, he knows anything can happen now, all the heads are following Rudi’s progress, and Rudi looks like a man who has just conceived the very notion of happiness, flicking his hair back from his eyes with a snap of his head, there is a sudden sense of magnetism in the room, Rudi seems attached to everyone, and Victor is one of the few who stands outside the performance, he settles instead into a moment of quietness, watching as Rudi gathers a group around himself, launching into some diatribe about dance as an experiment, all its impulses going to the creation of an adventure and the end of each adventure being a new impulse towards further creation, If a dancer, he is good, says Rudi, he has to straddle the time! He must drag the old forward into the new! to which his listeners nod and agree, charmed by what Rudi says, his accent, his mispronunciations, and Victor has seen this many times before, the way Rudi controls a crowd even off the stage, the way he swings from inanity to profundity and back again, Good God he’s not only beautiful but he’s smart too! and Victor loves to watch faces when Rudi is in full stride, it is one of the few stillnesses in Victor’s life — to watch Rudi in his flux — and sure enough, without missing a beat, Rudi smashes six glasses in the fireplace in a row and then begins to play Chopin on the grand piano, an étude, the whole room hushed and tethered to him, and when he is finished he shouts, Stop the clapping! for everyone knows Rudi needs the praise but he hates it also, to him life is an ongoing series of failures, the only way to continue is to believe that you’ve never done your best, for Rudi has said before, It’s not so much that I love difficulty, no, difficulty loves me

Victor once saw Rudi in his Paris dressing room before Corsaire, getting a warm-up rub from his masseur, Emilio, and Rudi was spread out on the massage table, the body perfectly sculpted, tough, white, coiled, a body that might make you stare unwittingly at your own, but what surprised Victor was not just the physique, but that Rudi had a special stand set up in front of the massage table and was reading a book by Samuel Beckett, signed for Rudi — For Rudolf, all good wishes, Sam — and Rudi was learning whole chunks of the book by heart, and later that night, at a dinner party in the Austrian embassy, he stood and performed a routine about stones in his pocket and stones in his mouth, quoted perfectly, syllable for syllable, to great applause and later still, while walking home, he quickened his pace towards the Seine and talked about how he had begun to believe that there should be no unity in art, never, that perfection embalms it, there has to be some tearing, a fracturing, like a Persian carpet with a wrongly tied knot, for that is what makes life interesting — Nothing’s perfect, not even you, Victor — and at the wall of the river Rudi scooped up a number of pebbles, borrowed Victor’s overcoat and stood precariously on the wall, launched into the speech once again, arms stretched wide, and Victor wondered what might happen if Rudi toppled into the water, if the Seine itself would dance

and Victor is delighted to see the party oiled smoothly now, everyone eating and drinking, a great buzz in the apartment, Rudi playing the perfect host, rounding the tables, chatting with guests, proposing a series of toasts, to his fellow dancers, to Martha, to Margot — To dance itself! — and Victor knows he must maintain the party’s thrust so he hops quickly across the floor and pulls a Temptations record from its sleeve, arranges it on the turntable, drops the stylus, adjusts the controls, and then darts into the kitchen where he barks at the help — I want every single plate back here in five minutes! Clean the whole fucking place! Get Rudi a drink! Get me a drink! Get everyone a drink! — and the music spills into the room, jackets get tossed onto the backs of the couches, feet slip out from shoes, shirts are unbuttoned, there’s a melting of reticence aided by the alcohol, a fat man in a fedora jiggles his flab near the stereo, a pretty actress raises the sight-lines of her skirt, Mick Jagger twists on the piano stool for a better view, Fonteyn throws her head back in laughter, Ted Kennedy shrugs off his tie, Andy Warhol enters in bright red pants, John Lennon comes down from his upstairs apartment with Yoko Ono on his arm, and Victor can feel the electricity of the night, bodies sweating, drinks shared, ends of cigars suggestively licked, and soon a whisper of sex on the air— Well, thank God for that! — as if the place has been somehow laced with Spanish fly, strangers leaning closer, women clandestinely touching each other on the inside of the arm, men rubbing shoulders, and the moment stabs Victor with energy as he watches Rudi flit among the groups, charging them with eroticism, man or woman, it doesn’t matter, Rudi sees it all as calisthenics for the hours ahead

eighteen months ago on vacation in Paris, at a club called Le Trap, in the upstairs room, lit only by red bulbs, Victor watched Rudi blow six Frenchmen in a row, stopping for a glass of vodka between each, only to hear that Victor had bettered him by two, Such fine French cuisine! So deliciously tender! so Rudi dragged the first three men he could find, lined them against the wall, A veritable firing squad! and went at them in the same way he danced, all elegance and ferocity, his sexual fame nearly equaling the renown of his dancing, Rudi was even known to take a break during performances for a quickie, and once in London he left the theater at intermission, pulled his overcoat over his dancing clothes, changed his shoes, ran down the street to the public toilets, where he entered a stall and was arrested for soliciting a policeman, But you can’t arrest me I have to perform in ten minutes, to which the policeman sniggered and said, Perform indeed, and the intermission stretched out over forty-five minutes until Rudi was found by his manager, Gillian, who shouted at the cop that the whole of England was waiting, and the cop laughed at her histrionics but allowed Rudi out of the handcuffs, and Rudi dashed back up the street, burst through the side entrance, bounded onstage, fired up by it all, and danced brilliantly, the newspapers said it was one of his finest performances ever, and during encores Rudi noticed the cop standing near the rear of the hall, grinning and laughing while Gillian tenderly stroked his lapel

and the night bends itself further towards lust as Rudi nods across the room at Victor, and Victor nods back, a secret language, so Rudi begins to make a round of the party, thanking the guests, effusive, benevolent, whispering in ears, closing business deals, shaking hands, sashaying back and forth, kissing Lennon on the cheek, Yoko on the lips, slapping Warhol on the ass, doting on Fonteyn, kissing Graham’s hand — Good-bye, good-bye, good-bye! — saying he has a late-night appointment at the Russian Tea Room, sorry, he must run, Please excuse me, a lie of course, but precisely calculated to begin to scatter the revelers, and Victor tidies behind the scenes, tips the hired help an extra thirty dollars each — Buy yourself something pretty, boys and girls! — and the party begins to splinter, on to other parties, nightclubs, even the Russian Tea Room, where the guests hope to dine once again on the vision of Rudi, but they won’t, because he and Victor have something else in mind, they descend by the stairs and whistle for a cab — the night air pinning them momentarily with its humidity — and soon find themselves in new territory, jumping out of the taxi on Twenty-eighth and Broadway where they step on the word BATH engraved in the sidewalk outside, Rudi adjusts the brim of his well-worn leather hat, Victor rattles the door four times like a code, then shouts Greetings! to the young man who opens the door, and they slide their money across the counter, get their towels, head along the pine-paneled corridor, through the indefinite light, towards the lockers, where they change out of their clothes as the noise of the place begins to engulf them, the slap of bare feet, the dripping water, the hiss of steam, the distant shouts and giggles, and, wrapped only in their towels, with their locker keys around their ankles, Rudi and Victor head to the heart of the Everard, which is in its very own way a ballet — some of the greatest ass mechanics in the city plying their trade here — guys in earrings, guys in heels, guys with eyeshadow, guys in dresses looking as if they just stepped off the set of Gone With the Wind, guys still in their Vietnam undershirts, guys in aviator glasses, guys smeared with oil, guys who look like girls, guys who want to be girls, some at half-mast, some at full mast, some unfortunates at no mast at all, some squatting over the water jets for a quick enema, a shriek coming from the shower rooms, and everyone fucking, flesh sandwiches, fucking in the rooms and fucking by the water fountain and fucking in the shower stalls and fucking in the sauna room and fucking in the boiler room and fucking in the broom closet and fucking in the rest rooms and fucking in the baths, fist-fucking, toe-fucking, finger-fucking, cluster-fucking, not to mention rimming, a regular fuckfest, as if Victor and Rudi put the lust pill in the water, hallelujah and hail to the fuck tablet! come on down! join in! no matter who you are! short and fat! tall and thin! rich or poor! small or large! (preferably large!) come to the Ever-Hard! and Victor spies one man, all loaded up on adrenaline and amphetamines, wearing only a boxing glove, the palm filled with lubricant, yelling Come and get it, come and get it, I’m a southpaw! and another quiet in the corner, just watching, his wedding ring on, a different class of asshole altogether, Victor hates the married ones, their sly effrontery before they return home to their wives, but who cares, who needs them, who wants them, there is more than enough to go round, and he turns to Rudi and says, All yours! because they never operate together, they remain apart, different ends of the spectrum, and within moments Rudi is off to the other end of the corridor while Victor roams his own turf, testing the atmosphere, scanning the faces, the first ten minutes always a ritualized staking out, intent and serious, Victor never quite sure where to begin, a fact-finding mission — it is impossible, he knows, to dive right into the fray — and he washes his face in the drip from a pipe, then cuts through the steam, all the time carrying his towel at his hip, a gunslinger, lowering his eyelids to say, No I don’t want you, I will never want you, not even if you were the second last man on earth, or holding them steady to say, Perhaps, or widening them to say, Yes yes yes, Victor darts his attention to an ass in the shower, or the hollow of a back, or the curve of a chestbone, or the arc of a mouth, or the turn of a hip, and he wanders until he feels his body revving up, blood boiling, desire rising, the steam shrouded over him now, yes yes yes yes, he gives a nod to a tall bearded blond boy who stands alone by the doorway to one of the rooms, blue-eyed, serious, and within moments they are meshed beneath the red lights, ignoring the sad sack of mattress on the floor, they go up against the wall instead, the slide of skin and the slap of desire, Victor allowing control, the man’s breath hot on his neck, reaching back to tickle his paramour’s balls, a rather pedestrian fuck, he thinks, choosers should never be beggars, and Victor composes himself when the man is finished, Gracias! and is off for more, deciding that he will be in the driving seat for the rest of the night, since that is the position he likes best, maximum locomotion, Gracias! Gracias! Gracias! a great incoming tide of fuckery, ruthless and merciless, first a boy, then a man, then another boy, with surely the most beautiful shoulder blades Victor has ever seen, he adores shoulder blades, he loves running his tongue along the high hollows in backs, then moving his mouth up along necks as the men shudder and moan, or running his teeth down the length of their spines, Victor never tires of fucking, he hopes he never will — the few straight friends he has, especially the married ones, don’t believe he can actually fuck all day long and continue fucking the day after that, they assume he is lying when he says he has had more men than hot dinners, but it’s the truth, the bare truth, Hot dinners, my friend, are vastly overrated, and he continues moving from body to body until finally he decides to take a small break, a temporary rest, and he approaches the baths, satisfied, happy, the hunt temporarily interrupted, he steps through the steam into the comfort of the water and soaks while the gymnastics around him continue — once upon a time the baths belonged to the Italians and the Irish, but since the late sixties, those glorious late sixties when flesh became fashion, the baths have belonged to the Victors of the world, the victorious, a risky business, raided occasionally by the cops, and Victor has spent nights in jail, where indeed the bathhouse tradition persists, such camaraderie! such affability! such jailhouse rocking! — and submerging himself now in the soothing warmth, Victor wonders how Rudi is getting on, but he knows there’s no need to worry, Rudi is human flypaper, the men stay suspended on the mid-air of him, stuck to the memory of the moment, and they will whisper about it for years to come, Well, I did my thing for the Cold War, yes, I got fucked by Rudolf Nureyev! And, let me tell you, he just hammered his sickle! and the story will be appropriated and reappropriated, the size of Rudi’s cock, the tap of his heartbeat, the feel of his fingers, the aroma left by his tongue, the sweat of his thighs, the imprint of his lips, and maybe even the sound of their own hearts breaking beneath their rib cages as he moved away