Dancing in the Light (35 page)

“About your sexual problem.”

“You saw a doctor about me?”

“Of course I didn’t mention your name,” said Vassy, “I just discussed your sexual problem.”

I was stunned.
“What
sexual problem? So things are not as intense as they were. So what? And what do you mean,
my
problem? It takes two to tango.”

Vassy got up and walked to the living room. Our friends were sitting there.

“Wait a minute,” I said, running after him. “Let’s talk about this. And let’s talk about it in front of Judy and Jerry. We’re close enough to them. They’ve been through their own sexual conflicts.”

“Fine,” said Vassy, sitting down on one of the stools by the kitchen counter.

“We have problems,” Vassy announced, “but Sheerlee is stubborn with her indifference. So I have seen doctor to discuss it.”

Judy and Jerry nodded, delicately acknowledging the sensitivity of the subject.

I could feel myself begin to boil. “Vassy,” I said, “I don’t really think this is about sex. Sex is hardly ever just about sex. Why didn’t you discuss it with me? Why did you go to an outsider? I didn’t even realize it was bothering you this much.”

“Doctor would know better,” he answered.

“A stranger, doctor or not, would know more about what I’m feeling than I would?”

“Correct.”

“What do you mean, correct?” I said, hearing my voice rise.

“You don’t listen to what I say. Doctor did,” he answered.

“But the doctor only heard it from your point of view,” I said, sitting down on the stool next to him to assert myself. “I resent it that you didn’t discuss anything with me. Really I do.”

“Doctor was informative,” he said.

“What doctor was it?” I asked. “Someone you knew?”

“No,” he answered. “I found name in telephone book. Doctor in Santa Monica.”

“In the
telephone
book??” I was incredulous. I just couldn’t believe what he was saying. And yet I did, I suppose, because I felt invaded. “Wait a minute,” I said, trying to control my voice, without success. “How the hell could you discuss what goes on between us with a perfect stranger? And without even mentioning it to me? I mean, if you were that bothered, why didn’t you say so? Why not tell me?”

“I wanted to discuss with doctor.”

I took a deep breath. “Well, it sounds to me like you’re doing a control trip again. You’ve tried to control how I eat, how I hike, how I sing and dance and act, and now, by God, now you’re into controlling what I do with my body in bed. The privacy of my sexuality means as much to me as yours does to you.”

“No,” said Vassy, “a man’s relationship with his sex is more important than a woman’s is to hers.”

Suddenly I wasn’t arguing anymore. I really saw red this time. In an outraged flash, I slapped Vassy across the face so hard and so fast that I connected completely. His glasses flew across the room. His face drained of color. He reached up to hit me, but the expression I saw on his face hit me first. It was steel-cold, controlled hatred. I gasped. His arm went down. Judy and Jerry bolted toward us. Judy grabbed my arms and Jerry grabbed Vassy’s.

Vassy’s implosive hostility made my blood run cold. It was what he
wasn’t
expressing that chilled me. What was really going on inside of him? I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

Immediately I disengaged myself from my own emotional violence. I was shocked that I had finally succeeded in hitting him so unexpectedly but I was stunned at the expression of cruel finality on his face.

Vassy released himself from Jerry. His expression didn’t soften.

Judy let my arms go.

“Jesus,” I said, “I’m sorry, Vassy. I didn’t mean to hit you so hard. But you had absolutely no right to invade my privacy by going to a doctor without consulting me.”

Vassy crossed the room, leaned over, and picked up his glasses. He put them on.

“Is finished,” he announced.

“What is finished?” I asked.

“Our relationship,” he said, “is finished. I will now leave.”

I laughed out loud. If I sounded slightly hysterical he certainly was being ludicrously melodramatic.

“Oh,” I went on, “I see. Now you are going to just refuse to discuss the responsibility we each have for what just happened.”

“Correct.”

“Oh.”

He straightened his back, put his hands on his hips, and walked to the refrigerator for vodka.

“You are violent,” he said. “I find your violence too frightening.”

“Yes,” I said, “I was violent, and I’m sorry. But what about your violence to my feelings? What the hell would you
expect
a woman to do when you say
you
as a man are more important than a woman?”

“Never mind. Is finished,” he answered.

I stood up. “What do you mean, finished? Are you serious?” I looked over at Judy and Jerry. Judy spoke up.

“Vassy,” she said, “don’t you think maybe you are afraid of your own violence? I saw the expression on your face. You could have killed Shirley. I think you were afraid you might.”

Vassy shot a contemptuous look at Judy. “Is finished,” he said. “I am leaving.”

I no longer felt like laughing at his melodrama. I realized he might mean it.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “You are really serious. What about our movie, what about working out our relationship, what about courage?”

For a long moment Vassy said nothing. Then, looking thoughtfully at his glasses, he said, “I know I will regret this for the rest of my life, but it is my destiny. I am leaving.”

I felt helpless. His male infantilism I did not even
want
to cope with anymore and his addiction to suffering was beyond my empathy.

But Jerry and Judy went over to him.

“Vassy, try to express what you are feeling,” said Jerry. “Before you make any rash decisions, please explore what’s really going on inside of you.”

Vassy walked toward the bedroom. “No,” he said with conviction to himself. “Is my destiny.” Vassy slowly disappeared down the hall. I followed.

Quietly Vassy packed his two pairs of corduroy trousers and his grandfather’s dress shoes. Neatly he placed his six shirts and two sweaters into his suitcase. He gathered his mother’s pictures, the icons of Christ beside his side of the bed, and his English-language tapes. He walked to the bathroom and boxed up his Water Pik and his Russian hair tonic. He stuffed his jogging shoes and hiking shorts into a plastic bag, and his toothbrush and electric shaver into his brown leather kit.

I looked around our room, paralyzed, watching him spirit himself away. He picked up his suitcase and threw his leather jacket over one shoulder. Then he glanced down at the ancient Russian Bible he had brought with him from Moscow.

“The Bible must stay here,” he said. “My Bible will always belong to you. It belongs here in Malibu with you.”

Tears of sorrow and futility filled my eyes. I knew he was really leaving. Had he planned all this, or was it happening spontaneously? He seemed unable to exercise any free will over what he considered to be his destiny.

I followed him to the front door. He leaned into the living room and said good-bye to Judy and Jerry.
I held the door open for him. There was nothing to say.

He began to descend the stairs in silence, then he turned around.

“Nif-Nif,” he said, his husky plaintive voice cracking. “My sunshine, Nif-Nif. Life with you was like music. And now the music is over. I will come back for my books and records someday later.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. Everything was so unreal. I thought of how life was a poor storyteller.

At the bottom of the stairs, he looked up again. “I was your Honeybear, and you were my Nif-Nif. But remember, you are also prancing horse. Horse from very good stable.”

I waved him through the red lacquer gate and he pulled away in his broken-down car.

The next morning, I went to New York. Vassy called me there a few days later. He cried over the telephone and told me how lonely he was. I said I would be back in a few days and we would talk. But when I returned, he didn’t want to. He had moved into the guest room of an old girlfriend. Within a week, he came down with pleurisy and lay brooding and depressed in his bed. He didn’t want to see me. He didn’t want to see anyone. I tried to cheer him up over the telephone, but it didn’t have any effect.

Weeks later we had dinner. He was sweet, but formal. He said he wanted a woman who would be his slave, who would love everything he did regardless. He wanted “an artist’s wife who would sit adoringly at my feet and tell me I am wonderful.” I remembered Milanka’s warning in Paris. I laughed. He laughed. He said he knew he was being simplistic, but that was the way he was. I said I understood.

But it wasn’t Vassy I needed to understand. It was myself.

The breakup left me with a deep well of loneliness. It was clear to me that the love affair had had no promise of permanence. I had somehow always
known that. Maybe he had too. Perhaps he had been more aware and courageous than I by acknowledging it first. Perhaps the loneliness came from the abruptness even in the face of inevitability.

For months afterward his “recklessness” and the loneliness it caused him also moved me to tears. I still felt almost tied to him and responsible for
his
pain. And what haunted me more than anything was the feeling that I hadn’t really understood what I was supposed to have learned from it all. Yes, I had finally known a Russian individual intimately with all that that implied. But
personally
I felt unresolved as to why we had come together in the first place.

I understood that any love relationship between a man and a woman was a learning experience for
self
, but my feelings when we partea spoke to something deeper … something I couldn’t put my finger on. I knew I should let my feelings of loneliness go, but I had never been able to walk away from feelings until I understood what caused them.

So, with these questions still in my mind, I began to realize that it didn’t really matter whether I understood Vassy. I realized that I should just accept him for the truth that was his. He needed to lead his own life, at his own pace, in his own way. Perhaps
I
was not respecting
him.
Perhaps
I
was proof that love and respect were not coexistent. When realized the impact of that thought, I moved out of my own confusion. I finally realized that I had only paid lip service to believing that love and respect were possible. It was now time for me to mean it. As a result, Vassy and I remained good friends and understood each other a great deal better after we parted than we did when we were together. We had more distance and the emotional involvement didn’t blind us anymore. We both recognized the love which was still intact and we both continued to realize how many lifetimes had bound us together.

Though my relationship with Vassy ended nearly
four years ago, his Bible still remains on my table in Malibu where he left it. He continues to insist that my house is its real home. He has realized his dream to make American films, and I know we will work together. McPherson was right. We both feel the need to spiritualize art, and when the time comes, it will happen.

He is respected in Hollywood because he is a fine artist. No one cares about his politics. They
respect
him. Love him? Many do. For him, he still maintains that love and respect are not co-existent human emotions. Most of his scripts reflect that feeling. He still insists that real creativity is not possible without suffering; in fact, he still believes that conflict is inherent in man and is, in his truth,
necessary
to life. He still believes that without struggle one cannot recognize God. He still believes in his concept of evil, that it exists as a force outside of man. He also believes that
God
is outside of man.

Thus, more to the point, he believes that the destiny of man is to suffer. So much does he believe it that I think he feels compelled to create it.

But then, don’t we all seem addicted to suffering in varying degrees? From guilt, because we feel we don’t deserve to be happy, from resentment of childhood wrongs or deprivations (how
long
it takes to grow up), or from failures in adult life—whatever—we all feel the pull and tug of negativity and insist it comes from sources outside of ourselves.

Yet in fact, both negativity and positivity reside within each of us. No one of us is completely in light, or completely in the dark. And most of us create our own problems. For me, since understanding myself leads to a greater expression of my positive aspects, then the journey within is the only journey worth taking. If that journey within leads to the recognition and awareness of my higher, more positive self, then I will have no more soul-searing conflict. Recognizing the God within myself, I will recognize the larger God-source, the magnificent energy
which unites us all. I believe
that
was our lesson for one another. Neither of us perceived ourselves as the other saw us. But we
did
see ourselves in the other.

Now when I reflect on the violence Vassy provoked in me, I bless him for it. He put me in touch with it so I could begin to resolve it. He provided me with the gift of understanding myself better. I hadn’t needed to talk to
him
, I had needed to talk to myself. His problems and conflicts were his, mine were mine. In that brief, tempestuous period of time we spent together, I saw more clearly than I ever had now much more I needed to grow.
Because
it was difficult, I learned.
Because
he confused me, I reached more clarity. And
because
we both realized our relationship was predestined by our own free will, we tried. We were preordained to make our music together in order to hear the discord as well as the harmony.

Vassy remains just as “Russian.” I remain just as “American.” We know we can co-exist now, but we each have separate paths of experience to pursue. Perhaps he is right when he says that love and respect are incompatible—in
his
experience. However, I don’t believe he is referring to people. I believe he is referring to the conflict with the God within himself.